In 1865 he was chosen as one of the Special Commissioners to negotiate a treaty of commerce between Great Britain and Austria. He had always been a Free-trader, and he was convinced that such economic agreements could do much to improve the world and to strengthen the bonds of peace. So he was ready and willing to do hard work in this sphere, and finding a congenial colleague in Sir Louis Mallet, one of the best economists of the day, he spent some months at Vienna in fruitful activity and won the good opinion of all associated with him. For his services he received the C.B. and high commendation from London.
This same year brought promotion in rank, though for long it was uncertain where he would go. In August he accepted the offer of First Secretary to the Legation in Japan, most reluctantly, because he saw his peculiar knowledge of Germany would be wasted there. Ten days later this offer was changed for a similar position at the Court of Greece, which was equally uncongenial; but at the end of the year the Foreign Office decided that he would be most useful in the field which he had chosen for himself, and after a few months at Frankfort he was sent in the year 1866 as chargé d'affaires to the Grand Ducal Court of Hesse-Darmstadt.
From these posts he was destined to be a spectator of the two great conflicts by which Bismarck established the union of North Germany and its primacy in Europe. Morier detested the means by which this end was achieved, but he had consistently maintained that this union ought to be, and could only be, achieved by Prussia, and he remained true to his beliefs. It is a great tribute to his intellectual force that he was able to control his personal sympathies and antipathies, and to judge passing events with reference to the past and the future. He had liked the statesmen whom he had met at Vienna, and he recognized their good faith in the difficult negotiations of 1865. But for the good of Europe, he thought the Austrian Government should now look eastwards. It could not do double work at Vienna and at Frankfort. The impotence of the Frankfort Diet could be cured only by the North Germans, and the aspirations of good patriots, from Baden to the Baltic, had been for long directed towards Prussia. But it was no easy task to make people in England realize the justice of this view or the certainty that Prussia was strong enough to carry through the work. Led by The Times, the British Press had grown accustomed to use a contemptuous tone towards Prussia; and when in the decisive hour this could no longer be maintained, and British sentiment, as is its nature, declared for Austria as the beaten side, this sentiment was attributed at Berlin to the basest envy. Relations between the two peoples steadily grew worse during these years, despite the efforts of Morier and other friends of peace.
The Franco-German war brought even greater bitterness between Prussia and Great Britain. The neutrality, which the latter power observed, was misunderstood in both camps; and the position of a British diplomat abroad became really unpleasant. Morier in particular, as a marked man, knew that he was subject to spying and misrepresentation, but this did not deter him from doing his duty and more than his duty. He took measures to safeguard those dependent on him, in case Hesse came into the theatre of war. He organized medical aid for the wounded on both sides. He took a journey in September into Alsace and Lorraine to ascertain the feeling of the inhabitants, that he might give the best possible advice to his Government if the cession of these districts became a European question. He came to the conclusion that Alsace was not a homogeneous unit—that language, religion, and sentiment varied in different districts, and that it was desirable to work for a compromise. But Bismarck was determined in 1870, as in 1866, that the settlement should remain in his own hands and that no European congress should spoil his plans. Morier found that he was being talked of at Berlin as 'the enemy of Prussia', and atrocious calumnies were circulated. One of these was revived some years later when Bismarck wished to discredit him, and Bismarckian journals accused him of having betrayed to Marshal Bazaine military secrets which he discovered in Hesse. Morier obtained from the Marshal a letter which clearly refuted the charge, and he gave it the widest publicity. The plot recoiled on its author, and Morier was spoken of in France as 'le grand ambassadeur qui a roulé Bismarck'. Yet all the while, with his wife a strong partisan of France, with six cousins fighting in the French Army, with his friends in England only too ready to quarrel with him for his supposed pro-German sentiments, he was appealing for fair judgement, for reason, for a wise policy which should soften the bitterness of the settlement between victors and vanquished. Facts must be recognized, he pleaded, and the French claim for peculiar consideration and their traditional amour propre must not be allowed to prolong the miseries of war. At the same time Morier did not close his eyes to the danger arising from the overwhelming victories of the German armies. No one saw more clearly the deterioration which was taking place in German character, or depicted it in more trenchant terms. But it was his business to work for the future and not to let sentiment bring fresh disasters upon Europe.
Apart from this critical period, life at Darmstadt bored him considerably. His presence there was valued highly by Queen Victoria, one of whose daughters had married the Grand Duke; but Morier felt himself to be in a backwater, far from the main stream of European politics, and society there was dull. So he welcomed in 1871 his transference first to Stuttgart, and a few months later to Munich, the capital of the second state in the new Empire and a great centre of literary culture. Here lived Dr. Döllinger, historian and divine, a man suspected at Rome for his liberal Catholicism even before his definite severance from the Roman Church, but honoured everywhere else for the width and depth of his knowledge. With him Morier enjoyed many conversations on Church councils and other subjects which interested them both; and in 1874, lured by the prospect of such society, Gladstone paid him a visit of ten days. Morier did not admire Gladstone's conduct of foreign policy, but he was open-minded enough to recognize his great gifts and to enjoy his company, and he writes home with enthusiasm about his conversational powers. A still more welcome visitor in 1873 was Jowett, his old Oxford friend, who never lost his place in Morier's affections.
Among these delights he retained his vigilance in political matters, and there was often need for it, since the German Government was now developing that habit of 'rattling its sword', and threatening its neighbours with war, which disquieted Europe for another forty years. The worst crisis came in 1875, when Morier heard on good authority that the military clique at Berlin were gaining ground, and seemed likely to persuade the Emperor William to force on a second war, expressly to prevent France recovering its strength. In general the credit for checking this sinister move is given to the Tsar; but English influences played a large part in the matter. Morier managed to catch the Crown Prince on his way south to Italy and had a long talk with him in the railway train. The Crown Prince was known to be a true lover of peace, but capable of being hoodwinked by Bismarck; once convinced that the danger was real (and he trusted Morier as he trusted no German in his entourage), he returned to Berlin and threw all his weight into the scale of peace. Queen Victoria also wrote from London; and, in face of a possible coalition against them, the Germans decided that it was wisest to abstain from all aggression.
A new period opened in his life when he left German courts, never to return officially, and became the responsible head of Her Majesty's Legation at the Portuguese Court. His five years spent at Lisbon cannot be counted as one of his most fruitful periods, despite 'the large settlement of African affairs', which Lord Granville tells us that Morier had suggested to his predecessors in Whitehall. For the big schemes which he planned he could get no continuous backing at home, either in political or commercial circles. For the petty routine England hardly needed a man of such outstanding ability. Of necessity his work consisted often in tedious investigation of claims advanced by individual Englishmen, whether they were suffering from money losses or from summary procedure at the hands of the Portuguese police. Of the diplomatic questions which arose many proved to be shadowy and unreal. Something could be done, even in remote Portugal, to improve Anglo-Russian relations by a minister who had friends in so many European capitals. The politics of Pio Nono and the Papal Curia often find an echo in his correspondence. Here, too, as elsewhere, the intrigues of Germany had to be watched, though Morier was sensible enough to discriminate between the deliberate policy of Bismarck and the manœuvres of those whom he 'allowed to do what they liked and say what they liked—or rather to do what they thought he would like done, and say what they thought he would like said—and then suddenly sent them about their business to ponder in poverty and disgrace on the mutability of human affairs'. In a passage like this Morier's letters show that he could distinguish between a lion and his jackals, between 'policy' and 'intrigue'.
Had it not been for Germany and German suggestions, Portuguese politicians would perhaps have been free from the fears which loomed darkest on their horizon—the fears of an 'Iberian policy' which Spain was supposed to be pursuing. In reality the leading men at Madrid knew that they had little to gain by letting loose the superior Spanish army against Portugal and trying to form the whole peninsula into a single state. Morier, at any rate, made it clear that England would throw the whole weight of her power against such treatment of her oldest ally. But alarmist politicians were perpetually harping on this string, and Morier, in a letter written in 1876, compares them to 'children telling ghost-stories to one another who have got frightened at the sound of their own voices, and mistake the rattling of a mouse behind the wainscot for the tramping of legions on the march'.
To Morier it seemed that the important part of his work concerned South Africa, in which, at the time, Portugal and Great Britain were the European powers most interested. It was in 1877 that Sir Theophilus Shepstone annexed the Transvaal, and many people, in Europe and Africa, were talking as if this must lead to the expropriation of the Portuguese at Delagoa Bay. Morier himself was as far as possible from the imperialism which would ride rough-shod over a weaker neighbour. In fact, he pleaded strongly for British approval of the pride which Portugal felt in her traditions and of her desire to cling to what she had preserved from the past. Once break this down, he said, and we should see Portuguese dominions put up for auction, and England might not always prove to be the highest bidder. Friendly co-operation, joint development of railways, and commercial treaties commended themselves better to his judgement, and he was prepared to spend a large part even of his holidays in England in working out the details of such treaties. He studied the people among whom he was, and did his best to lead them gently towards reforms, whether of the slave-trade or other abuses, on lines which could win their sympathy. He appealed to his own Foreign Office to abstain from too many lectures, and to make the most of cases in which the Portuguese showed promise of better things. 'This diet of cold gruel', he says in 1878, 'must be occasionally supplemented by a cup of generous wine, or all intimacy must die out.' Again in 1880, he asks for a K.C.M.G. to be awarded to a Governor-General of Mozambique, who had done his best to observe English wishes in checking the slave-trade. 'Perpetual admonition', he says, 'and no sugar plums is bad policy'—a maxim too often neglected when our philanthropy outruns our discretion.
When Morier was promoted in 1881 to Madrid, he used the same tact and geniality to lighten the burden of his task. No seasoned diplomatist took the politics of Madrid too seriously. Though the political stage was bigger, it was often filled by actors as petty and grasping as those of Lisbon. The distribution to their own friends of the 'loaves and fishes' was, as Morier says, the one steady aim of all aspirants to power; and measures of reform, much needed in education, in commerce, in law, were doomed to sterility by the factiousness of the men who should have carried them out. In the absence of principles Morier had to study the strife of parties, and his correspondence gives us lively pictures of the eloquent Castelar, the champion of a visionary Republic, the harsh, domineering Romero y Robledo, at once the mainstay and the terror of his Conservative colleagues, and the cold, egotistic Liberal leader Sagasta, whose shrewdness in the manipulation of votes had always to be reckoned with. The constitution given in 1876 had entirely failed to establish Parliament on a democratic basis. For this the bureaucracy was responsible. The Home Office abused its powers shamelessly, and by the votes of its functionaries, and of those who hoped to receive its favours, it could always secure a big majority for the Government of the moment. For the three years which Morier spent at Madrid, he recounts surprising instances of the reversal of electoral verdicts within a short space of time.